DBA_TAB_MODIFICATIONS can miss multi-table inserts July 5, 2010

Last week I blogged a piece all about DBA_TAB_MODIFICATIONS and how it captures all normal DML against table. However, a word of warning. This may not be true for multi-table inserts. It appears that inserts via multi-table inserts are not recorded in DBA_TAB_MODIFICATIONS for 10.2.0.3 and a couple of 9.2 versions of oracle.

{My thanks got to my comrade-in-arms Basavaraj Patil for this. He not only noticed the issue but tracked it down to multi-table inserts, came and told me about it and then said I could put it in my blog. This is his work really}.

I will not go into multi-table inserts right now but it is a very nice feature that was introduced with oracle 9 which allows you to insert a row into several tables at a time or into one of different tables. In fact, I think it is a relatively unknown feature. Check out this oracle-base article on new 9i features that mentions it or go pull up the Oracle 10 SQL reference manual.

There is a bug with Oracle up to 10.2.0.3 and 9.2.0.6 and 9.2.0.7.
It is fixed in 9.2.0.8, 10.2.0.4 and 11.1.0.6
Bug number 4572043 it you have metalink.
It impacts direct load merge statements as well as multi-table inserts, but I have not tested and verified the direct load merge statement.